Also, when posting your code, please use code tags so that your code will retain its formatting and be readable. To do this, you place the tag &#91;code] at the top of your block of code and the tag &#91;/code] at the bottom, like so:

Java Code:

&#91;code]
// your code block goes here.
// note the differences between the tag at the top vs the bottom.
&#91;/code]

thanks for the quick reply :-)
I am using eclipse. The files are in the src directory, and I also checked and saw that eclipse copied the very same files (input1 and input2) to the bin directory (where the compiled class files are when the interpreter runs them.

so I assume that you put the files into the
"/home/ronny/workspace/Textbook/"
directory, correct? I'm confused. You are 100% sure that you are using the full file names, that you're not missing a simple extension such as ".txt" or something similar? It's probably a simple mistake here that we are both overlooking.

What you need to do is try to do something even simpler than what you are doing now. Just simply try to open a simple text file, read the lines and output them to the console as you read them. If you can get that working, then you will likely get this working.

That means, the specific code block where the operation that deals with persisted data MIGHT throw a FileNotFoundException if that file doesn't exists, the compiler tells you that you have to catch such type of exception before running it....

or else, your program might behave badly....

that scenario may relate just like this,

Java Code:

public int logic(Object o){
if(o.equals("hello")
return 0;
}

The sample code will return 0 if the object equals to "hello",

The compiler will then ask you like this,
what if the object is not equal to hello? what value should that method return?